Frédéric Beigbeder et ses doubles (review)

This is a semi-scholarly book, perhaps appropriately for an author whom the French critical establishment regards as semi-literary. The volume contains academic essays, but also interviews and correspondence with Beigbeder, literary anecdotes, fragments and a final piece purporting to describe an encounter between an American academic and Beigbeder’s fictional alter-ego, Octave Parango. Two absences from the volume are noticeable, and commented upon in the introduction. Firstly, none of Beigbeder’s numerous detractors are included in the book. Durand writes that he solicited contributions from numerous hostile critics, but was refused. Richard Millet provides the only negative voice, but the brief exchange of insults between him and Beigbeder in an interview reprinted from L’Express offers little engagement with the more problematic aspects of Beigbeder’s work. Other essays do at least provide reference to the critical controversies stirred up by the author, including to Pierre Jourde’s twenty-page diatribe in La Littérature sans estomac, enabling readers to discover the other side of the debate for themselves. The other absence, which may not be unrelated, is that of French critics: all of the academic contributors are affiliated to either American or Dutch universities. Durand speculates that it may be easier for Beigbeder to be taken seriously as a writer outside his home country, where his work is not overshadowed by his status as a media personality. In some cases the foreign perspective works very well: the best of the essays comes from the Dutch academic, Sabine van Wesemael, who offers an illuminating comparison of the transgressive fictions of Beigbeder and Michel Houellebecq in France with the work of contemporary American writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, arguing that their bleak social satires present a worldview in which ‘il semblerait que seule la sauvagerie soit l’alternative à la dépersonnalisation’ (p. 167). Elsewhere, it is less successful. A translated article on Windows on the World ignores so many of that novel’s most troubling elements — chief among them the pornographically rendered sodomy scene between two World Trade Centre executives trapped in the towers — that the reader must suspect the essayist has been overly reliant on the bowdlerized American translation of the book, despite page references to the original edition. Other essays in the volume focus on individual novels or give thematic overviews of Beigbeder’s œuvre. Particularly interesting among these latter are a chapter by William Cloonan on the relevance of Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum to Beigbeder’s world, and one by Ralph Schoolcraft, who takes a sociological approach to the representation of consumer capitalism in the novels. Other more personal or whimsical pieces in the book are less interesting to the academic reader, but perhaps broaden the volume’s appeal beyond the university. What is not in doubt is that Beigbeder, as one of the handful among his generation of French writers to have made a significant impact on readers beyond France, is already overdue some critical attention of this sort.